6. ‘Why Women Still Can’t Have It All’ by Anne-Marie Slaughter

Proving that the issue of work-life balance can be endlessly re-trod, this article in The Atlantic probably ignited the most discussion of any this year. Slaughter told a depressing story of how she took a dream job in Washington, DC as the director of policy planning for the State Department only to discover that “I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be—at least not with a child experiencing a rocky adolescence.” Slaughter was not exactly staking new ground, but her conclusions struck many women as something of a betrayal, and hundreds of other columnists and bloggers responded, including our own Touré (“Men Never ‘Had It All,’”) and Judith Warner (“Why We Need To Stop Talking About Having It All.”) Clearly, in this case, we couldn’t.